James Baldwin's Vision of Otherness in 'Sonny's Blues' and Giovanni's Room

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SOURCE: "James Baldwin's Vision of Otherness in 'Sonny's Blues' and Giovanni's Room," in CLA Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1, September, 1988, pp. 69-80.

[In the following excerpt, Bieganowski discusses the ways in which the characters in "Sonny's Blues" acquire self-knowledge and the implications such knowledge has for their relationships with others.]

For several decades now, James Baldwin has maintained his position of importance among black writers through his novels, stories, essays, and interviews, generating continued scholarly interest. In her recent book on Baldwin [James Baldwin, 1980], Carolyn Sylvander points to the "nuclear ideas and beliefs" around which Baldwin's works have developed and grown over the years. For many readers, Baldwin establishes as the basis of his fiction "the quest for identity," for "true, fundamental being" and the dislocations of the modern world. For instance, Shirley Ann Williams summarizes the core of Baldwin's fiction: "Most of his characters have at the center of their portrayal an isolation from the society, the culture, even each other" [Shirley Anne Williams, "The Black Musician: The Black Hero as Light Bearer," James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Keneth Kinnamon, 1974]. While Baldwin's characters do show deep alienation from the world about them and certainly from other people, most significantly Baldwin's major characters show a profound alienation from themselves. That tension directs the energies of his stories.

One of the most recurrent but least defined of Baldwin's nuclear ideas is his equation: "To encounter oneself is to encounter the other" [The Devil Finds Work]. For several of his important characters, reconciliation with society and with each other can occur only after they have made peace with themselves. Two focal works, "Sonny's Blues" and Giovanni's Room, together define the full range of this equation between the self and other as well as reveal a recurrent process in his writings. As John Reilly suggests, Baldwin's "leading theme—the discovery of identity—is nowhere presented more successfully than in the short story 'Sonny's Blues.'" Giovanni's Room, often overlooked because it appears to be Baldwin's weakest novel, represents, in Robert Bone's judgment, "a key position in Baldwin's spiritual development" ["The Novels of James Baldwin," Tri-Quarterly, Winter, 1965]. Brother in "Sonny's Blues" and David in Giovanni's Room clearly focus Baldwin's vision of otherness requiring a profound sense of one's self.

For Baldwin, a fully human understanding of another person depends upon truthful self-knowledge: "One can only face in others what one can face in oneself" [Nobody Knows My Name]. This interdependence between a vision of otherness and one's sense of self operates vividly in Baldwin's fiction. Such mutual knowledge operates at significant levels in Go Tell It on the Mountain, Another Country, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Just Above My Head. Specifically, Baldwin's masterfully fashioned "Sonny's Blues" can alert us to some brilliant facets of the larger, more roughly drawn, Giovanni's Room: Brother's understanding of himself allows him to recognize Sonny's pain as well as Sonny's own self-understanding; because David never comes fully to accept himself, he never truly loves Giovanni. Among Baldwin's writings, the two stories share a common narrative structure; they echo with comparable imagery, reflecting windows and mirror; most importantly, they address, with their central energies, this human truth based on the reciprocal knowledge of self and other. And finally, together these stories reveal Baldwin's larger devotion as artist to the freedom and fulfillment of the human person.

In each story, the narrator confronts his own self-image as he struggles with understanding, with love of the important other person in his life. Though Sonny's brother's preoccupation with himself makes him intolerant of Sonny's troubles, the pain and mystery of his daughter's death waken him to his wife's wound and to Sonny's need. Brother (Baldwin gives him no proper name) achieves his identity as Brother in his listening to Sonny. David, in Giovanni's Room, cannot turn his gaze fully away from himself toward Giovanni. David remains isolated in the egotism of his sympathies. As Robert Bone has pointed out, both Sonny and Giovanni share priestly roles as journeymen in suffering ["The Novels of James Baldwin"]. More significantly, however, the narrators—Brother and David—contain the dynamic tension in each story. "Sonny's Blues" begins with Brother staring at his own reflection in a subway window and closes with his watching Sonny play; Giovanni's Room begins with David watching his reflection in the "darkening gleam of the window pane" and ends with his image trapped in the bedroom's mirror. Each story gains its vitality from the intimacy each narrator gains with himself through feeling compassion for Sonny and Giovanni.

"Sonny's Blues" shows the narrator's (Brother's) growth from apparent self-reflection, really self-absorption, to authentic self-knowledge gained through honestly listening to Sonny himself. The story opens with Brother's shock at the news of Sonny's arrest for using and selling heroin. The first paragraph records Brother's astonishment at this news: "I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work…. I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside." Transfixed by Sonny's arrest, Brother identifies the dread reflected back to him in the subway window as finally dread not for Sonny but for himself: "I couldn't believe it: but what I mean by that is that I couldn't find any room for it anywhere inside me." Through Brother's further self-reflections, the story probes his feeling of being "trapped in the darkness which roared outside." Darkness outside reveals his own inner darkness.

Brother's reflection in the subway's window occurs simply because the train tunnel is darker than the lighted subway car. The outer darkness provides the background against which he can see himself. In an important reminiscence of his childhood, Brother describes the role outer darkness played at his family's Sunday night dinners. He remembers his mother along with older church folks and relatives on Sunday afternoon, talking after the big dinner:

There they sit, in chairs all around the living room and the night is creeping up outside, but nobody knows it yet. You can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes and you hear the street noises every now and again, or maybe the jangling beat of a tambourine from one of the churches close by, but it's real quiet in the room. For a moment nobody's talking, but every face looks darkening, like the sky outside.

Brother's memory is from a child's perspective as he recalls that "everyone's looking at something a child can't see." An adult's stroking the child's forehead eases the fear caused by the coming night's blackness.

When the lights are turned on, the children are filled with inner darkness, confusion, insecurity. The children do not understand because they have not yet lived through outer darkness. In reminiscence, Brother recognizes what the adults then were seeing and talking about because now, as an adult, he understands that there exists outside a good deal of darkness. Brother's memory of those Sunday dinners ends with this recognition.

The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It's what they've come from. It's what they endure. The child knows that they won't talk anymore because if he knows too much about what's happened to them, he'll know too much too soon, about what's going to happen to him.

Pain or suffering or death constitutes the bleak substance of experience from which these people fashion themselves. The adults, telling their stories, achieve a moment of authority over their experience and testify to the success, though perhaps minimal, with which, for the present, they have met the outer darkness. Because of the outer night, they have had to find inner light to live. In their talking, they bear witness as individuals and as a religious family to the presence of that inner light. After a painful argument, Brother leaves Sonny's room in the Village. With tears in his eyes, Brother whistles to himself, "You going to need me, baby, one of these cold, rainy days." At that moment, Brother believes that he is addressing Sonny. Later, in the midst of his own outer darkness, Brother realizes that he needs Sonny. Only when Brother admits that he lives in the nightmare of his child's death can he then understand what the adults were talking about after dinner and what Sonny plays in his music. The day of his daughter's funeral, Brother can write Sonny in jail, recognizing, "My trouble made his real."

Sonny, of course, knows dim streets as well as heroin's blankness. For him music, the blues, instead of talking, helps tame the terror of the roaring night. Sonny, in telling his own blues, gains some sense of who he is. Talking, telling, and playing the blues require a reciprocal understanding that starts with one's own sense of self. Trying to explain to Brother why he must play, Sonny describes the self-knowledge, the self-possession, necessary for authentic blues, for meaningful talk.

You walk these streets, black and funky and cold, and there's not really a living ass to talk to, and there's nothing shaking, and there's no way of getting it out—that storm inside. You can't talk it and you can't make love with it, and when you finally try to get with it and play it, you realize nobody's listening. So you've got to listen. You got to find a way to listen.

The loneliness of Sonny's own storm tempers his spirit so that he gains some momentary hold on himself. Though precarious, incomplete, and temporary, that sense of himself allows him to speak through his music. (Ida Scott, in Another Country, sings movingly not because of her vocal power but because she sings out of a profound sense of self.) As Sonny achieves a sense of identity through suffering his private pain, so analogously does Brother deepen his sense of self when he finds room inside for Sonny and his trouble.

While listening to a gospel singer in the street, Sonny recognizes in her song a parallel to his own trial: "Listening to that woman sing, it struck me all of a sudden how much she must have had to go through—to sing like that. It's repulsive to think you have to suffer that much." When Sonny tells through music his tale of suffering, Brother hears corroborated his own pain: his daughter's death and his temporary rejection of Sonny. In that moment of reciprocal understanding, Brother knows that "the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air." For Brother, the musician, the artist addresses the darkness outside:

For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

For Brother, Sonny's blues replaces the family's talk after Sunday dinner. Sonny, in the night club's center light, offers hope to those in the circles of darkness outside. As John Reilly concludes, Sonny, with his insight into suffering, can lead Brother to a discovery of self in community [see "'Sonny's Blues': James Baldwin's Image of Black Community," in Negro American Literature Forum, Vol. 4, No. 2, July 1970]. Brother recognizes Sonny with his own "cup of trembling." He finally listens to Sonny telling how he suffers; in that listening Brother hears his own storm inside. Now he can fully acknowledge Sonny as "my brother." In affirming that relationship, Brother takes possession of his own identity. He who had no proper name throughout the story has learned who he is from Sonny. Brother, in saying "my brother" of Sonny, necessarily says "brother" of himself.

..…

In "Sonny's Blues," this reciprocal vision of otherness is also described in the imagery of music. At the nightclub where Sonny plays his blues, Brother says:

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations.

Brother, of course, finally has that something open within and he can really hear Sonny's blues. David appears never to really hear Giovanni, fearing corroboration from Giovanni of the needs deep within David himself. Other Baldwin characters also struggle to gain their own self-understanding as they come to know another more deeply; certainly Leo Proudhammer of Tell Me How Long and Hall Montana of Just Above My Head do so.

Brother goes on with his consideration of music as he describes the musician. The artist hears something other than person, private, vanishing evocations. The musician addresses the roar rising from the void and imposes order on it. Sonny's playing provides a moment of revelation for Brother and for the reader. Sonny leads Brother to understanding himself and others through listening to the blues. In his vision of otherness, James Baldwin, through Brother's and David's telling their tales, leads his reader to human truth.

Some years before publishing these stories, Baldwin offered a description of the truth he believes fiction must approach. He writes in "Everybody's Protest Novel":

Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment.

Baldwin distinguishes this devotion to the human being from devotion to humanity, wanting to avoid devotion to a cause or to a cultural invention. He specifies this truth necessary to fiction by identifying what a human being is. The human person is

… something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable. In overlooking, denying, evading his complexity—which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves—we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims.

The reciprocal understanding necessary for Brother and Sonny and for David and Giovanni defines the reciprocal vision necessary to seeing the truth in Baldwin's fiction. One can only face in Baldwin's writing what one can face in oneself. For Baldwin, "our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—that is accept it."

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